BACK TO CAMPBELL RIVER.
Day 297 – It’s cooler here – low 50’s when we wake up and highs in the 60’s during the day. It rained on & off today and last night. Today was cloudy.
We were gone all day, leaving the campground a little before 9 a.m. We drove to Port McNeill to find the location of Mackay Whale Watch in advance of Friday’s scheduled whalewatching trip. The next town south is Telegraph Cove. We drove there to locate the site of Tide Rip Adventure Tours where we’ll be going next Tuesday for a Grizzly Bear Watch. Beginning Sunday we have reservations at a campground near Tide Rip, so we swung by there to check out our campsite in advance. We liked the site and will be able to avoid any unpleasant surprises when we get there Sunday.
We ended up driving more than 5 hours total to and from our campground at Marble River to Campbell River to run our errands. In the end we were happy we got it all done. Our mail had finally arrived after more than nine days stuck in Montreal at Customs. We bought a cooler (for the fresh fish we were going to transport today) and a kitchen timer at Canadian Tire (our timer died and how do you cook without a timer?). We found our brand of kitty litter and bought a couple of large bags. We had lunch at a great little place right on the marina by the ferry terminal – Quay West Kitchen – and had fish n chips; delicious. We stopped by the visitor’s center to get a sweatshirt I wanted, but they’d sold out. We got gas for the Honda. We went to the local fish market, Crabby Bob’s, to stock up on fresh fish to fill our new ice chest (everything remained super-cold until we got home). We got a propane refill for the RV. We went to the BC Liquor Store to stock up on the good stuff, and we went grocery shopping. We’d planned to stop at a couple of used book stores to trade in books we’d read and buy new ones, but we ran out of time for that errand.
The Honda full of stuff, we arrived back at the RV at 6:30 p.m. The girls were grouchy. They were not happy we were gone all day. They were bitchy with us and with each other. It was not pretty. We put everything up, filled our freezer to the max, skipped dinner because lunch was big enough, fed the irritable girls, and finally sat down to relax, glad to be back at the RV with missions accomplished. The high today in Campbell River was 71 degrees.